Perth | How the west has won

CATHRYN CARVER remembers clearly the day ANZ Banking Group chief executive Mike Smith called to ask her to begin managing the bank’s sizeable institutional business across Australia and New Zealand.

Smith was keen to convince the well­regarded Carver, who was running global capital markets for ANZ in fast-paced Hong Kong, that the job would be a great move – even though he was shifting the role from Sydney to Perth.

It was 2011. Smith was shaking up ANZ and wanted senior management closer to the growth, though Perth was hardly seen as a banking nerve centre. Rather than a leg-up, it could have been seen as an exile, and Smith thought it could be a hard sell.

What Smith didn’t know was that Carver was born and schooled in Perth. She needed little convincing of the merits of a city at the epicentre of a once-in-a-gene­ration mining boom and the lifestyle opportunities it offered. “I thought I’d have a little fun. I screwed my face up a bit," Carver laughs. “Then I said ‘you know, the interesting thing is that when I left, I told my parents I was never coming back’. He said, ‘Oh, you’re from there. That’s great!’"

Carver is another of Australia’s business elite who have made the move to Perth, along with the tens of thousands of mining and services workers who have swarmed there. All are enticed by opportunities offered by some of the world’s biggest companies, ­as they cash in on hot demand in Asia for the state’s vast store of commo­dities.

The intellectual and commercial strata are also joining the rush, which has maintained its momentum despite the cooling of commodity prices and postponement or cancellation of some big mining projects.

Shell, Chevron, Woodside, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto are still expanding in Perth. So too are the consultants keen to pick up their business. Local investment bankers are pitting their wares against the global heavyweights establishing offices along St Georges Terrace, such as Goldman Sachs and UBS. Leading consulting firms McKinsey & Co, Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Co have all moved to town.

And where the money goes, the human capital eventually flows. It is this second wave of employees from the upper echelons of the business world that has turned the city’s infamous “brain drain" to a “brain gain".

Related Quotes

Company Profile

After years travelling the world with Exxon, Woodside chief executive
Peter Coleman
left Houston for Perth to head up the oil and gas company in 2011.

Woodside
corporate and commercial exe­cutive director
Rob Cole
moved to Perth in the 1980s from Canberra to chase his girlfriend (now wife), Angela Kennedy.

“If you go back 10 or 20 years in Perth, it was a given that if you wanted to advance your career as a professional you would go somewhere else – Sydney, Melbourne, or internationally – and maybe never return," Cole says. “You would go to Sydney, Melbourne or internationally. “I think what is really exciting about what is happening now, is that increasingly Perth is a place that people feel they can have any part of their career working in."

Pouring into Perth

Now about 40 per cent of Woodside’s graduates come from interstate. Yet, for 17 years, far more people left WA than came. This ended in 2004. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show WA enjoyed net interstate immigration of 2095 in the 2004 financial year. By March last year, the state recorded its highest level of net interstate population growth in more than 30 years. More are coming from overseas.

Of the 3.1 per cent growth in population in 2012, 1.9 percentage points were attributed to overseas arrivals. With more than 1100 people a week pouring in, Perth has been the fastest-growing capital city for a decade. White-collar professionals are piling into glistening new office towers such as the BHP building, the group’s largest single site metropolitan office, housing 3000 staff. This, in turn, drives new business – cafes, bars and restaurants are springing up across the city.

WA accounts for a quarter of BHP’s global workforce and even though it maintains its local head office in Melbourne (employing about 300 people), Perth is the global headquarters for its iron ore, aluminium and nickel divisions, and its Australian petroleum business.

Veteran Perth dealmaker
John Poynton
says people of a high calibre are moving to Perth.

“The value of these [mineral] assets for BHP, Rio, Chevron and others means that, compared with the rest of the asset port­folio internationally, they’ve had to bring really good-quality people to town to manage it, because it is so important to their survival," Poynton says.

American
Ann Pickard
’s eyes light up talking about Perth, three years after relocating from Nigeria to lead Shell’s Australian operations.

“It has to be one of the most exciting places on Earth right now for oil and gas businesses," ­Pickard says.

“I love being in the centre of it and where the action is happening."

Pickard, described by Forbes as one of the 50 most powerful women in business globally, wants more Australians to move to the city as the oil and gas major looks to develop its operations.
Shell
is an investor in seven of the biggest natural gas projects in WA and Queensland. This includes its Prelude project, building the world’s largest floating offshore processing facility.

“This is cutting-edge technology we are ­bringing to Australia and no one knows how to ­operate it," Pickard says. “So we have set up a training institute with the idea that ‘I don’t want to go up and down the [St Georges] Terrace stealing people to work’. What I want to do is to find people that really want a career in this new and exciting sector. We can upskill them, cross train them and whatever it takes and hopefully I can get a few people from the east coast to come over too."

Her office overlooks the Swan River and she lives in the beachside suburb of Cottesloe. She talks of seeking places to live while still in Lagos.

“I’m looking on the internet and I discover this place called Cottesloe where I can go for a run on the beach in the morning, I have restaurants within walking distance, there’s a tennis club and golf club right there," she says.

“It’s heaven."

Swelling talent pool

And even though Perth experienced a dip in sentiment last year, when falling iron ore prices triggered job cuts, the state’s broad base of resources is still pulling talent to town.

“I don’t think the fundamentals have changed," Poynton says. “It’s easy to say the iron ore price has dipped . . . but the money’s being spent, particularly in oil and gas.

“Projects like Prelude are huge. I haven’t detected less [of a] flow of people coming here. Rio’s Sam Walsh leaving [to head up Rio Tinto in London] I guess is an example of the quality of people we have here."

For incumbents such as
Wesfarmers
, the swelling talent pool is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are more moving to Perth, but retaining staff has become harder.

“When I moved to Wesfarmers in 1993, it was a top 20 or 30 Australian company, but there weren’t too many others [in Perth]," managing director
Richard Goyder
says.

Irish engineer Brian Kelly moved to Perth in 2009 to lead global engineering firm Kentz’s Australian operations. He describes the next stage in his career as a rare opportunity. Chevron’s $43 billion Gorgon project is the largest single natural gas project in Australia’s history and one of nearly $200 billion in projects under way or committed to start in the state. “There is opportunity here for anyone who wants to be involved in key legacy projects," he says.

The arts sector is also enjoying strong sponsorship from resources majors (see “Corporate cash flows into art", right) and more than 60 small bars have opened in the past four years.

But there are some big city problems. Congested traffic forces the daily commute for those in outer suburbs beyond an hour. A coffee can cost $5, and some bars are charging $29 for a martini. A pint of beer can cost $16. These are constant frustrations for the locals.

Yet Kelly, 35, is fitter than ever for his Perth experience. In his first year there he took on the city’s premier running event – the 12 kilometre City to Surf, which starts in the heart of the city and ends at the picturesque City Beach.

The following year he did the half marathon. This year, it was the marathon. Now, he’s trying triathlons.

“That’s something I never thought I would have done before I moved to Perth".